Hello there ! (one day I should stop beginning with this ^^")
It's been many months since you heard about SWR. But as I said, I want to bring a more finished version of the demo =)
it will still be just a demo, any kind of real game isn't planned, and I'll be switching to another project once SWR demo will be done
So, what's up ?
A few levels, in terms of pure art. Just cause I wanted to bring on more levels now I've defined a solid way to produce them =) (And you probably don't know my penchant for making overkill details & stuff no one but me will notice x)) New levels added consists in :
Jedi Temple on Coruscant, showing magnificent blue holobooks, one of the high places of Order 66. I found cool to create this interior environment,it was like playing the sims except you can craft everything you want. I learnt a lot while making this, especially on the texturing process. Making env. Art is definitely a technical problem to solve first, making sure your shaders meets most requirements, having the good texture palette (that's how I see an atlas, just a painter's color palette. Offering enough texel density & surfaces when covering most of the room).I initiated this level last year for just a single shot of the trailer, keep in mind that I simply wanted to show like... a wall behind Mevenn, and perhaps a balcony and a sculpted bust. I ended up making the whole place. It's always like that, I plan a little thing, then I add a lot over the first idea. Pfew !
I started off with a simple shape to kinda mimic the good old battlefront 2 level from Pandemic, just to have a starting point for the servers blocs. Then I brought a box around them and started to build some things. I wanted to bring the player close to the server towers in confined clusters, that's why you see a 1st floor. And this was only a starting point made roughly at the end of the day. Next was about to be much more exciting and it brings the Archives level to another pleasing state of nostalgia exploration. Archives was already good as is and "Servers Room" was only meant to be a bonus, for when I will have time to build it... and I finally added this to the level in nearly a little week of work (put apart the Jedi Statue sculpts ^^)
Statues are completely using the Jedi characters assets I made before them, but they are static and uses only a single UVSet without mirroring/overlapps, since I wanted to control completely the surface and avoid unwanted "butterflies" patterns. There came a wonderful tool of 3DCoat : UVs. Cool point is they are synced with paint layers, so if you rearrange them, 3DCoat will automatically bake old texcoord to new one for each layer. It's awesome how it saves a lot of time ! This way I could simply repack my textures per statue, reduce drawcalls and improve the final look while keeping normalmap/AO baked data =) It's wonderful ! An important point to keep in mind when doing this is to avoid to rotate or flip UV islands, else you will break the bake of your normalmaps. And don't worry, you'll see jedis next in the post ;)
Next environment is the "Lucrehulk's Corridors", giving the demo a deeper Prelogy mood. I loved crafting this level, as it's the first memory I have of the entire Star Wars franchise. Yep. I didn't start with A New Hope but with Phantom Menace, the first shots over Naboo, Qui-Gon Jinn & Obi-Wan slicing BattleDroïds with John Williams music to emphasize the whole thing...this has rapidly become a strong good memory.
In case you wonder, yes, I love both trilogies but the prelogy is definitely my favourite one for dozens of reasons (if you want to discuss this...let's go in the comments ^^")
So here is a little glimpse at the last assets I did for the level, but it's globally the same routine : Roughly lay out ideas in 3dsmax with a quick blockout, test "Lego" pieces and see if it feels right, then start the pipeline...
Make a texture palette, model assets, unwrap, integrate. Done
Except here I wanted to refine a technique I used on Lumberia Assets : make use of a second UVmap to add dirt over the base surface. This greatly helps selling the asset as part of its world and not just a 3D asset with tiling stuff everywhere. Making big environments of course you will use tiles a lot, but it's better if you can hide them as much as possible. One solution would be to make everything by hand on a 8K map, pretty un-optimized and not the best time saver...another is to mix UVs to actually texture your asset, using fewer maps. Like really fewer. It's also way faster than painting 8K maps per asset of course ;) I keep this for really important props and characters, but tiles are textured the same way : by hand. Smartmaterials are a base, just a base. It's up to you to take your best brushes and give these automated texture a better & more personnal look ;) The diff with how I approached this technique on Lumberia is on details put into the dirtmap. Lumberia has a shy paint look, I wasn't completely sure of the direction I wanted to take, and I had only straight dirt gradients. A lot of variants, colors...etc, but here what really helped me is I decided to add circular and rectangular dirt shapes, and when you have domes, boxes and curved areas, this rapidly becomes helpful. Else it simply requires more vertices on the geometry, just to support a second UVmap...I don't like it, especially if I can avoid it.
Here's the comparison of with and without this "Dirt" effect :
Looks better, right ?
Now here's how it looks once polished :
Also new characters, such as these R2 Units, with cool animations to enjoy of course. Animation is a fun part of game art I learnt to enjoy thanks to Akeytsu. Anim - I think - is often misunderstood compared to modeling or texturing. Sadly, it's probably the most interesting part =P. That's where things get alive at their deepest level. Especially an important point to keep in mind if you're in 3D. I've been making tons of environments & characters, but being able to animate them gave a new dimension to my work. I can finally give life to them, it's a really special feeling ♥
You can view more R-Units here : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/G881qd
Jedis are also coming in, as I want to populate levels a bit more. Since I wanted to have some being's species, I made a few variants, mostly for the head. Here is a line-up showing globally every "asset". I can mix them to get a lot of unique characters. To spice up a little more the cocktail, I've made 5 new lightsaber hilts, inspired mostly by Prelogy designs. The double hilt is my favorite (don't hesitate to tell which one you love the most in the comments ;) ). Of course I can change blade colors at will, and each Jedi can handle both right/left sabers (even 2 doubles, like Krell) so there are a lot of possibilities. Here are a few shots, but you can have a closer look at them here : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OmxKZg
Two little tips about skinning though =) I don't remember if I've said this somewhere else, but : use QUADS. But only for skinning, else it's simply a non-sense (especially when you rely on normalmap bakes), always remember geometry is made of triangles, not quads. Quad mesh facilitates skinning for a simple reason : smooth algorithms. When you smooth a vertex weight, you basically ask the software to look at nearby vertices weights and lean towards their values, this way you'll reduce the gap between them and reach a smoother joint influence through your mesh. Nearby vertices are defined by connected face, using a quad you preserve edgeloops & flow, so your texture remains nice when deformed. If you smooth a triangulated mesh, things can rapidly become bad. But don't worry, you can of course skin roughly your triangulated model, then transfer skin on a remeshed model to fix weavy weights, and transfer back to your tri-mesh =) No need to have the best flow ever, just quads and a model at least as dense as the final one, also no UVs needed here, as we only need it to support skinning data ;)
Second tips : use "global" retopo to ensure smooth connection between cloth parts/layers. Here I had to keep the cloth bands following the Pelvis/Stomach/Spine/Torso, so I used a global mesh underneath to copy/paste skinweights, then I removed influences from shoulders and gave them to extra cloth joints. Just so I can adjust these parts if needed and avoid them to always depends on arm-cloth. If the jedi is in a relaxed pose, then I need to keep the shoulder cloth up =)
Also, as I wanted to have modular possibilities on my character like changing the lenght of the sleeves, their meshes needed to be split out of the main body part. Thanks to the same global mesh I could transfer the connected area weights and avoid having ugly seam when deforming each sleeves =)
Finally,if you look closer you can see meshes only has one side. This simply helps keeping final mesh thickness cause I'll source a single vertex for two targets, so both will end up with the same weights and reduce drastically front/backfaces overlapp fights
Isn't she beautiful with these skinweights ? Fun fact : twilek version wasn't planned at all. It was... (guess what ?)
A bonus. Hohoho =) But a really good one, that's my favorite version of the female Jedi Knight ♥
The whole texture painting job is done on 3DCoat, except for baking (Marmoset Toolbag 4)
Using smartmaterials here : https://www.artstation.com/a/548911 as a base. I highly encourage artists to take control over their textured asset, don't let smart material do the job, it's always better when you can feel the human artisan's craft =)
Below are some old WIP shots of the male version, the outfit colors wasn't good yet and I didn't paint over the leather of the boots. It looks a bit better once finished ;)
I wanted to bring a more painterly look to the base color (I really loved what Fortiche Prod did with Arcane. Animation is awesome, but what bugged me even more was the painterly look they managed to put everywhere, it's extremely fine, precise, aaaaand wild/bold at the same time. I love it so much ♥ So as overwatch did back in 2016/2017, Arcane inspired me)
To finish, please keep in mind that this is still WIP and subject to change/evolve up to an unkown level, it actually depends on how much time I can pour into the project. I'm working hard on it (like never before) since early March of this year, and I wish things will be over as soon as possible. But I don't plan to release something i'm not proud of.
Cheers, et que la Force soit avec vous =)
des Bisous ♥